Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje
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relationships were based on deference and paternalism within a hierarchy. With the rising egalitarianism of the American Revolution, the concept of free labor spread. As commerce expanded and ports grew, the labor force became more anonymous. Since the employer-employee relationship did not depend on previous personal connections and would appear as strictly a business deal, the new labor context should have led to more independent contracts between the sailor and his employer. It did not. Instead, intermediaries like boardinghouse keepers became increasingly important in arranging work. Some boarding-house keepers ran large establishments that could accommodate more than one hundred men, while others merely rented out space to two or three sailors from their sparse living quarters. Often they were ex-sailors themselves, or the wives of men at sea.56
During the eighteenth century these men and women loomed large in the lives of sailors both at sea and at port. In 1762, a Frenchman in Port-au-Prince wanting to maintain contact with his landlady gave a letter to a sailor going to New York to deliver to her.57 Repeatedly, mariners who were suing for their wages in the 1770s and 1780s had innkeepers (the term “boarding-house keeper” does not appear frequently until after 1800) sign their bonds as surety in their court cases.58 Assistance in wage disputes remained central to the boardinghouse keeper's relationship with sailors in the nineteenth century. Around 1800 young Nicholas Isaacs found himself stranded in New York, striving to get back wages. After a lawyer would not take the case, in stepped Mr. Spiliard, a boardinghouse keeper, who said he could get a settlement of $80 (Isaacs claimed he was owed $400). Spiliard was as good as his word, although he then presented Isaacs with a bill for $70.59 Several years later, sailors from the ship Union gave Richard Jennings, who ran a New York boardinghouse, power of attorney to collect several hundred dollars in a court case involving an embargo violation.60
We know most about the boardinghouses during the nineteenth century, when they became the central clearinghouse for the hiring of seamen, and when they came under attack from reformers.61 By the opening decade of the nineteenth century, boardinghouse keepers were very important to the waterfront in big ports like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The more sailors that were needed, the more central the boardinghouse became. Even in smaller, more specialized ports like Providence and New Bedford, the boardinghouse was crucial. In 1807, Captain Elijah Cobb visited sailor boardinghouses in Norfolk, Virginia, paid the advance to the landlords, and took their “obligations to see each sailor on board, at sun-rise.”62 The New-Bedford Port Society in 1831 reported that there were twenty-one boarding-houses in the whaling port, each serving between twenty and two hundred patrons. By 1845 there were at least thirty-seven boardinghouses serving hundreds of sailors.63
In the 1820s and 1830s reformers began to portray the boardinghouse keeper as a corrupting influence upon seamen. The relationship between the sailor and his landlord, however, was more complicated and subtle than the reformers thought. Some boardinghouse keepers were not exploitative and offered a sort of home away from home to the sailor. Nathaniel G. Robinson wrote his sister in 1843, describing his young widow boardinghouse keeper in sympathetic terms, proclaiming that she ran “a first rate boarding place” in New London. He made a point to tell his sister that the widow was a Methodist and lived with her mother and two young children.64 Susan Gardner (Harose), who prided herself on the domestic and benign nature of her boardinghouse for American seamen in Le Havre, France, explained, “it is a great satisfaction to me to see all of these [sailors who had previously boarded with her] return the same as they would to a Mother's house.”65 The boardinghouse keeper passed on mail to friends and relatives.66 Sometimes the landlord would act as a bank, holding onto money or possessions while the sailor went on a voyage. The boardinghouse keeper also might aid the tar, even if he had nothing in his pockets or if he fell sick. A shipwrecked Ned Myers hunted up his old Liverpool landlady, and as Myers reported, “the old woman helped me to some clothes, received me well, and seemed sorry for my misfortunes.”67 At the Providence Marine Hospital in 1840, one-fourth of all the sailors checked into the facility were brought there by one man, Jesse A. Healy, a boardinghouse keeper.68
Even the more unsavory landlords were providing, for a price, what seamen wanted. They greeted the sailor as he came ashore, took his baggage, and offered him lodgings, drink, and whatever other services he required. When the sailor's money ran out, they extended credit until they could arrange for the sailor to sign aboard his next voyage. When the sailor needed anything for his “kit,” or sea chest, they provided it. When the sailor found himself in trouble with the law, they offered bail. While groggily getting his sea legs on his next voyage, many a sailor cursed his boardinghouse keeper as a landshark for taking him for all he was worth; but that sailor eagerly sought the same lodgings when he returned to port.69
Despite the large amount of money apparently passing through their hands, few boardinghouse keepers became very rich. George Gardner adamantly opposed his sister Susan's plan to open a boardinghouse after her sea captain husband died and she was stranded in Europe in 1825. Gardner wrote that it was “the last thing I should recommend” and argued that “it is a slavish business and very unprofitable.” He also confided that he had stayed in many boardinghouses and had seen the “low discomforts” of the keepers, with many people leaving without paying their debts. From his perspective there were “Sundry Vexations incident to business.”70 With an advance from a friendly sea captain, Susan managed to succeed, even if she did not make a fortune. She wrote to her mother two years later that her establishment could accommodate about twenty men at a time. She had invested $2,000 in furniture, bedding, dishes, and other items, and paid $800 a year in rent. If the house were full she could clear four or five dollars a day over her expenses. With any luck she could earn $500 a year. The margin for error was slim. Most of her initial investment had been on credit. If forced to sell, she would be lucky to get half the value for the furniture and goods she bought and would be left with almost nothing.71
A sailor would probably stay with his own family if they lived nearby, but most sailors stopped in so many different ports, or had families at a great distance, that lodging in the boardinghouse became part of the identity of Jack Tar. Horace Lane proclaimed that to be a sailor in a port was to stay at a boardinghouse. Remaining in the cramped quarters of the forecastle was beneath a tar's sense of self-worth. Lane explained that as a young man, “I thought I was a sailor, and should disgrace myself if I did not do as the rest—viz. to go on shore to a boarding house as soon as a ship was made fast, and the sails furled.”72 This sense of identity with occupation and the boarding-house led to distinctions between rank and race in some larger ports. John Remington Congdon, serving as second mate in 1840, went to a Liverpool boardinghouse that catered to men of similar rank. The men serving before the mast—common seamen—went to other boardinghouses, and the black cook went to yet another boardinghouse run by an interracial couple.73 The boardinghouse and the landlord were thus prominent features of the waterfront community and crucial to the portrayal of the stereotypical Jack Tar.
Although boardinghouse keepers remained important in arranging work for sailors, by the 1830s and 1840s, specialized shipping agents opened offices in several cities and even sent runners into the countryside to recruit labor. These middlemen were particularly active in the whaling industry's search for cheap labor. In 1837 Jacob Hazen signed on with a shipping agent in Philadelphia, who sent him to an agent in New York, who in turn arranged for Hazen to join a whaler out of Sag Harbor on Long Island. The charges for the services, room, board, and outfitting came to more than $100.74 Fourteen-year-old Eli P. Baker met the “runners of the ship Mary” in Albany in 1844. The agents brought him to New York and then sent him on to New Bedford and a two-year cruise without ever getting his father's permission.75 J. Ross Browne believed he had been misled by the New York shipping agent who sent him to New Bedford. The agent had told him: “a whaler is a place of refuge for the distressed and persecuted, a school for the dissipated, an asylum for the needy! There's nothing like it. You can see the world; you can see something of life!”76
Recruitment into the navy or on privateers was similar to recruitment of merchant sailors. Occasionally American captains in dire need of men resorted to impressment, a policy generally limited to European powers. Navy recruiters usually set up a rendezvous house, supplied music